


Speir(s)

by CoraxAviary



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Body Horror, Crack, Gen, Lovecraftian, idk not really body horror, tags confuse me i'm sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-31
Updated: 2020-08-31
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:33:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26206474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CoraxAviary/pseuds/CoraxAviary
Summary: A crack-y discussion about the name Speirs, and what it implies. Oneshot.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 4





	Speir(s)

“So uh, you ever wonder why his name is Speirs?” Skip says from one of the barn beams, far above. He has a single straw of hay between his teeth, and he talks around it, slurring slightly.

“Whatcha mean?” responds Malarkey, who lazily cranes to look up at Skip, whose legs are dangling so he can’t see his face. Malarkey absently worries his rifle strap between his fingers, and lays farther back into the hay. “You mean his first name?”

“Nah, his name. Speirs,” says Skip back with overly hollowed-out vowels, and he spits out the hay. “Like, why?”

“Don’t think it does good to wonder anything ‘bout him,” says Penkala, sitting against the wall, fiddling with a field ration package. The sky is darkening outside, and there are only a few rays of sunlight that slip through the cracks between the wooden slats in the barn. Soon there would be none. Penkala moves into the spotlight of one last white streak of light, and makes small foil crunching sounds until the bag opens.

“His name is Speirs. But, like,” says Skip, echoing from above. “Two of ‘em. Two Speirs.”

“It’s not spelled the same,” says Malarkey. The barn door creaks open, and the three men see a pair of silhouettes slip inside and close the door.

“Hey fellas,” says a strange voice. It’s not exactly deep, but it is familiar.

“Sir?” says Penkala, straightening in sudden fear.

“Hell naw,” says Luz, bursting out in laughter. The other tall man – Toye, it seems – laughs quietly behind Luz. “It was that good?”

“Yeah,” says Penkala shortly, and he goes to sit back down in the hay.

“Hear y’all talking about Speirs,” says Luz loudly, and all the other men shush him. “Not like he’s gonna appear if ya say his name.”

“Don’t tempt fate,” says Skip.

“How’d ya get up there?” asks Toye, looking up at Skip, who is swinging his legs but not really able to do anything but sit.

“Ova there,” says Skip, pointing to a ladder that leads to a shallow loft. “Climbed on the beam.” Skip looks down at the ground, a long distance away. “Maybe I should get back, huh. Should get some sleep.”

Toye doesn’t say anything, just hums in passive agreement. Penkala eats his rations, staring somewhere distant.

“So, whatcha think, Luz?” says Skip, voice moving back eerily in the barn as he scoots along the beam back to the loft. “Why ‘Speirs?’ Why ain’t he named ‘Speir?’“

Malarkey snorts. Penkala chews. Toye moves around fluffing up hay to find a good place to sleep, and Luz shuffles.

“Ain’t names just… passed down?” says Luz. Malarkey _mm-hmm_ s in agreement.

“I guess,” says Skip, who is now trying to dismount from the beam and get into the loft, hanging awkwardly with one leg and both arms hooked over the beam, and his other leg – too short – scooping for purchase, inches away from the loft floor. He untangles himself, hangs by only his arms, and makes it onto the loft with a hollow bang and a cloud of dust. “But his name. Implies there may be a Speir. A single Speir.”

There’s silence, broken at this point only by Skip thumping down the creaking ladder and Penkala spooning more rations into his mouth with a clack of teeth on metal.

Luz makes a sound of revelation. “I got a story.”

“Thought you were gonna answer my question, Luz, but okay–”

“It’s the answer.”

“Oh, alright,” says Skip, finally on the floor, and he crashes down next to Malarkey, sending flicks of hay into the air. Malarkey coughs, waving a hand uselessly through the dust.

“So, uh,” says Luz. “I read somewhere in an article or something–”

“Didn’t know you read, Luz,” interrupts Malarkey.

Luz continues, unperturbed. “That sometimes you got siblings, like twins or something. But one’a them doesn’t make it. Dies, I think. Can’t exactly remember.”

Penkala shifts uncomfortably, and shoots a glance out a crack in the wooden panels to look in the general direction of Dog Company.

“So, like, inside the mom, like… the womb,” says Luz, “One’a them eats the other. And they become, like, uh, one kid.”

There is silence for a few beats.

“You’re saying his name is Speirs because he ate his twin in the womb,” Malarkey says sarcastically, not so much a question as a sarcastic statement of conformation.

Luz nods uselessly in the darkness. “Yeah.”

Malarkey turns to Skip. “Ask dumb questions, get dumb answers,” he says.

Penkala suddenly laughs through a mouthful of food. “So there were two’a them Speirs and then he ate one? He’s actually two combined separate Speirses?”

“Well, where else would he get his creepy personality?” says Luz.

“Hey, he’s not creepy,” interjects Toye. “Just got some dark rumors around him.”

“Rumors which are based on reality,” says Malarkey. “Remember I told you, when I was walkin’ away after he handed ‘em all–”

“Yeah, yeah, you told us this story a thousand times, Malark,” says Skip. “But I mean, it would explain some things if he did eat a twin in the womb–”

“Wait, wait,” says Penkala. “You got this all wrong. For Speirs to have his name, it got passed down by his dad, right?”

The men chorus a series of _mm-hmm_ s, except for Malarkey, who sighs.

“So it was someone way before his dad. The original Speirs. The original Speirs started out a Speir, and it was him who ate his twin.”

“Hey, this is all based on an assumption,” Malarkey begins, sitting up straight with his M-1 in his lap. “I’m sure Luz isn’t even right about eating babies. It sounds like bullshit news to me–”

The barn door creaks, and all the men go quiet, eyeing the door with trepidation. It’s someone tall and straight-backed, an officer. Toye stands up, and all the others do too, until a voice from the door tells them to go back to whatever they were doing.

“Just checking up,” says Winters with a comforting nod that is lost in the dark to half of the men. He gives no sign that he had heard their conversation, except perhaps a slightly raised eyebrow. The men who notice tell themselves that they are overreacting. Winters wouldn’t believe they were seriously discussing the eating of babies, would he? He drums on the door with his fingers, and starts to close it. “Goodnight, boys.”

“ ‘Night, sir,” the enlisted men say, and the door shuts with a creak and a small thud. The men stay in silence for a while, thinking, and the sound of crickets rises in the distance. Someone shifts against the hay, and Penkala rustles with the last of his ration pack, and clangs around with his spoon.

“Hey, guys?” says the voice of Skip into the silence. Malarkey groans, already thinking he knows what Skip is going to say. If it isn’t what he predicts, it would probably still be a brain-dead statement anyway. “If Speirs ate the other Speir and that’s why his name is Speirs, then did Winters eat a Winter?”

The silence that follows is short and shocked. Penkala and Luz gasp momentarily, and Toye sputters out a sound of indignance.

“Oh my God,” said Malarkey, and he settles back deeper into the piles of hay, trying to close his eyes and drift off to sleep.

The sounds of argument drift far over the barn and out past the thin wood slats, carried by the cold French wind eastwards over Dog Company. Ronald Speirs, at the edge of his company, sitting by himself with a can of rations, wonders what the men in the barn are talking about.

He lights a cigarette for himself, and takes a drag, feeling the burn in his lungs and the smoke going down and then circling in his sinuses when he blows it out through his nose. Someone on the border of Easy stumbles by in the deep, murky darkness, and he swears to himself, kicking at the rock in his path. Speirs can’t tell who it is, but he still keeps his cigarette case in his hand, knowing the low flame-colored glow of his lit one will illuminate a small area in the relative dark.

“Cigarette?” asks Speirs into the impenetrable black of night.

“N-no, sir,” gets out the man, who lingers for a second before absconding westwards into the safety of his company and the seeing eyes of the watchers stationed around the border.

Speirs almost smiles to himself, tucking the case back into his pocket, and he enjoys the cigarette while it lasts. It doesn’t last long, like most things, and he drops it onto the ground and watches it sputter before grinding it into the dirt with the heel of his boot.

He listens to the drifting conversation of the East men in the barn until it becomes wavering static, and the sky and its stars become too bright.

And he thinks briefly of his family – Mother, Father, and the four others. He lays down in the grass and dirt, and then thinks of the one who had been.

It is not now, and yet a part of him. He smiles, eyes sparkling and teeth gleaming, and he lets himself dig deep, for a millisecond, for the other.

And then they sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, this is a 2:00 am random idea that me and my sister were scream-laughing about: Why is Speirs plural? And what do the men think about it?
> 
> I don’t usually write in present tense, but today it kind of came out and I think it lends the prose a kinda weird, immediate, present feel, kinda like you enter the void of starless night where you encounter Keter-class abominations and eldritch terrors for one dream a day and then this strange universe that contains a nightmare Speirs is what plays in your head. 
> 
> As always, this is not meant to reference the real historical soldiers. This is based on the fictionalized HBO versions.
> 
> I made art for this, by the way: https://coraxaviary.tumblr.com/post/626758873145131008/rubinecorvus-so-this-started-out-as-an-eldritch


End file.
